The focus on coming up with unusual passwords for getting into secure sites is probably misplaced, particularly when those passwords are accompanied by user names that are all too guessable. That's what a joint academic and industry research team has come up with after nearly a year of working together on the problem of authentication.

MIT has shared additional details on how it plans to spend a $15 million cybersecurity grant. The multidisciplinary effort will address cybersecurity from three directions: technology, public policy and organizational management.

Northern Arizona University has recently replaced its aging identity management system that authenticates and authorizes 180,000 users of everything from e-mail to the ERP system, and in the process it has consolidated resources, brought its data into strict standards compliance and boosted processing speed.